Edith Head dressed Grace Kelly’s Frances Stevens in 'To Catch A Thief'. Pictured here is a still from the film. Photo: Filepic
The origin story of Edith Head, the quintessential Hollywood costume designer of the 20th century, is a tale of equal parts artistry and chutzpah.
In 1923, when Head saw a job posting from Paramount seeking a costume sketch artist, she asked students at the art school where she was working to give her sketches that she could pass off as her own.
The apparent versatility of her portfolio amazed the studio’s chief costume designer, Howard Greer.
When Head started at the job and her abilities weren’t quite as advertised, Greer told her he had always known she had borrowed the sketches. He hired her, Head recalled years later, because “anyone who had that much desire to get into the studio deserved the job”.
Recently, a dozen of Head’s sketches from the 1950s and 60s (these are actually hers) were put up for sale by Doyle, an auction house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The lots included art from two of the most recognisable characters Head ever dressed: Grace Kelly’s Frances Stevens in To Catch A Thief – two sketches of costumes for Kelly in the film went for US$5,000 (approximately RM22,340) apiece – and Kim Novak’s Madeleine Elster in Vertigo – for a final bid of US$1,800 (RM8,042).
Over her career, which spanned five decades and hundreds of movies, Head received 35 Academy Award nominations and won eight of them.
Her range was expansive, if often reliant on a snugly nipped waist.
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Head, who died in 1981, concocted several ways to highlight the ambitious shoulders of Anne Baxter and Bette Davis in All About Eve, she made endless variations on a delicate little skirt suit for the heroines of Alfred Hitchcock nail-biters, and she designed full skirts that seemed entirely made of glitter for festive eyepoppers like White Christmas.
She popularised the sarong, the toreador pant and other fashions from abroad for Western audiences.
Still, she remained cleareyed about her limits with a resigned humour, famously saying, “You can lead a horse to water and you can even make it drink, but you can’t make actresses wear what they don’t want to wear.”
Colleen Atwood, the Oscar-winning costume designer for Chicago and Memoirs Of A Geisha, praised Head’s restraint.
“I have always liked Edith Head because she designs with simplicity,” Atwood said. “It’s not over-designed.”
Atwood, 76, had a poster of one of Head’s designs for The Birds hanging in her apartment in London while she was working on the Netflix series Wednesday. She said that Tippi Hedren’s icy wool suit was a direct inspiration for Gwendolyn Christie’s character in the show.
Atwood also reported a Head sighting in the wild – at Studio 54 in the 1970s.
“She came in with this entourage of young, beautiful boys,” Atwood recalled on Sunday. “Edith had on this black top, this pop art black-and-white skirt. She looked amazing.”
Throughout her career, Head exhibited an intuitive skill for self-promotion by going on radio shows, selling dress patterns, writing instructive books and even playing herself on Columbo.
Perhaps to set herself apart from the actors and actresses around her, Head developed a signature style for her public image: round dark glasses, sleek curled bangs and little suits, as tightly styled as her witticisms.
Drake Stutesman, a film scholar and historian, said that Head “was inventive and simple and sexy – she was very good at those three things together. This could be on Mae West and it could be on Audrey Hepburn.”
Head’s influence in the world of fashion started right away: After the release of her wardrobe for Mae West in 1933’s She Done Him Wrong, Elsa Schiaparelli designed hourglass-emphasising dresses topped with feathered hats and boas.
But Head borrowed as much as she gave. In one notable minor scandal, she snubbed Hubert De Givenchy, withholding credit for his work in Sabrina, the 1954 romance starring Humphrey Bogart and Hepburn.
Head’s distinctive look made her an easy icon.
She appeared on a postage stamp in 2003 and in a Google Doodle in 2013, and though the exact inspiration is debated, Edna Mode, the gutsy costume designer character in The Incredibles, with her dark glasses and severe haircut, seems in the mode of Head.
Peter Costanzo, Doyle’s executive director for books, autographs and photographs, said Head’s sketches are notable for their dynamism.
Contrasting Head’s illustrations with the more static sketches of other designers, which might show a character modeling a costume as if she were a clothes hanger, Costanzo, 44, pointed to a sketch of Judy Garland that was set to be auctioned.
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“In Edith Head’s costume sketches,” he said, “There is a lot of movement.”
Of the 12 Edith Head designs up for auction, all but one – the only sketch made and signed by an assistant, not Head herself – found buyers.
The two Grace Kelly designs fetched the highest sums, and although most of the hammer prices fell short of estimates, a partial sketch for a costume to be worn by Judy Garland in I Could Go On Singing that features no head but a deliciously jutted hip drew a hammer price of US$1,400 (RM6,255) – more than double its upper estimate.
Most of Head’s sketches for sale were from the collection of Emerio Gonzalez, an interior designer and collector in St Petersburg, Florida.
Gonzalez, 64, started collecting costume sketches 30 years ago. He noted that Head had a strict attention to detail, evident in her penciled notes beside her drawings, which would sometimes feature notes like: “Don’t let the scarf cover this piece of jewellery.”
Head’s goddaughter, Melissa Galt, a business strategist for interior designers in Scottsdale, Arizona, said that like Galt’s mother, actress Anne Baxter, Head had never stopped working.
“That passion is kind of rare,” Galt, 63, said. “There would have been a lot of doors and opportunities closed to her if she had not self-promoted.”
She remembered “Aunt Edi” wore bright “big Mexican skirts, which was quite an interesting contrast” with her cultivated public image. She complimented her godmother for keeping secrets.
When asked for an example of one, Galt said she didn’t know: “She kept them!” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
